In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Semi-commercial (Peasant) Rice-growing 85 85 chapter 7 Semi-commercial (peasant) rice-growing The concepts “tribal” and “peasant” both subsume the sorts of societal groups which engage in agriculture basically because the family (and the tribe or village community) must provide a substantial proportion of its basic needs for food and shelter directly from its own resources. The fundamental objective of the practice of agriculture and related subsidiary activities such as fishing, hunting and collecting is the maintenance of the family, present and future, and to a varying degree, the maintenance of the local community as well. The main economic differences between tribal agriculture based upon shifting cultivation and peasant agriculture based mainly upon sedentary cultivation is that the latter involves the sale (either directly or indirectly) of a significant portion of production, contributing notably to the national economy. The major social difference is that tribespeople are members of small scale social units while peasants are members of larger units. In location, tribal agriculture is peripheral and upland, while peasant agriculture is central and lowland. The location pattern of lowland rice-growing in the 1970s has been indicated earlier (see Chapter 5), and some of the reasons for its lowland concentration have also been discussed. The total number of people involved in and dependent upon lowland rice cultivation have not been easy to estimate. Attempts to enumerate the number of padi farmers in the labour force were not particularly successful, mainly because of definitional problems during surveys. The 1947 census of population, for example, indicated that there were some 470,000 padi farmers in Peninsular Malaysia, comprising a quarter of the employed population, but an employment survey in 1962 showed that there were only about 300,000, making up 13 per cent of the work-force, though this survey clearly indicated a further 126,000 padi farmers “outside the labour force” (Purcal 86 Agriculture in the Malaysian Region 1965). In 1973, the Malaysia Official Year Book estimated that about 20 per cent of all economically active persons were rice farmers. It is unlikely that this proportion had changed significantly by the 1970s and on this basis perhaps 800,000 people, 40 per cent of the work-force in the primary sector of the economy may be considered to have been employed in rice-growing of one sort or another. This includes shifting cultivators, however, and a rough estimate of 700,000 peasant farmers engaged in growing wet rice, with or without supplementary shifting cultivation or perennial crops would be of the correct order at that time. Perhaps the most striking feature of wet-rice cultivation is that in the Peninsula, growers belong to one ethnic group — the Malays. Temiar shifting cultivators regarded rice in general and wet rice in particular as a Malay crop (Hill 1977), a view that would seem to be shared by most other groups in the Peninsula. With only minor exceptions, such as the Temuan, the growers of wet rice are Malay. In Sabah and Sarawak, where Malays are in a minority and traditionally were traders rather than peasants , the growing of wet rice was a basic trait of lowland tribal peoples, whether coastal groups such as the Tuaran Kadazan of Sabah’s west coast, peoples of the interior basins such as those of Sensuron described by T.R. Williams (1965) or those of the far interior such as the Kelabits of Sarawak (Harrisson in Hill 1977). But amongst these, as amongst the Malays of the narrow valleys of the interior of the Peninsula, shifting cultivation is, or was, an important supplementary activity. historical Background1 The practice of growing rice in the carefully-prepared and maintained environment of artificial swamps (termed sawah or bendang in most of the region) is probably a fairly late introduction to the area, though the crop itself, Oryza sativa, would seem to have been introduced in prehistorical times, having reached East Malaysia by about 2,000 BC. Cultivation in bunded fields may have been introduced to the Peninsula as late as the fourteenth century, while irrigation techniques, in the sense of applying water to the land in controlled amounts, is a later introduction, confined to the Minangkabau peoples of Negeri Sembilan, parts of Perak and inland Pahang. Large-scale irrigation, involving thousands of hectares from a single source is even more recent, all the major schemes, except that in the Krian district of Perak, having been constructed since the 1950s. 1 A fuller discussion of these matters is to be...

Share